I'm pretty sure that a marriage counselor to orthodox Jews with their 8-10 kid families isn't trying to teach those poor fools that Tab A goes into Slot B. The point of the book is that it's a sex manual appropriate to the needs and beliefs of those particular people-to improve their intimate lives, not to tell them how to do it.

Bless your heart, Renee, how do you know the first thing about what kinds of intimate conversations other married people have? I think if a marriage counselor to these people sees a need among his clients for this, he's probably got a reason for it.

It may have escaped their notice, but adherents to traditional philosophies, including mainstream religions, are more likely to enjoy evolutionary fitness.

Not only do conservative men and women embrace procreation, and the actions which lead to its realization, but they are also less likely to sacrifice or exploit an innocent human life to secure their wealth and welfare.

The rule of thumb is just do what feels good for both you and your partner, and accept responsibility for the potential, but predictable outcome of your behavior.

It's amazing to observe just how capable people are when they are not treated with contempt by their purported superiors

Oh Lordy, my initial reaction was how much fun it would be to smuggle into the books a bogus envelope of drawings, showing varieties of sexual positions that would make the authors of the Kama Sutra blush. Imagine the hijinks that would ensue.

For thousands of years, people were agrarian and were able to observe nature. My mom, born and raised on a family farm by people both born and raised on family farms (and so on, back through time), used to say that farmers kids got the basics of reproduction pretty early on and pretty much by osmosis, as a result of daily life. Perhaps more urban types don't have that advantage. And then, of course, historically people often lived in more cramped, family dwelling circumstances, so...overhearing and whatnot

Now, where the legs and arms go and other niceties that can enhance the basics of reproduction, that's a different thing.

Read a book on the Ultraorthodox in Israel some time ago. It included an anecdote of a couple that was having trouble conceiving. They thought they were doing everything "right" but they really had no idea about "insertion" and their premarital instruction was too vague!

I'll keep my arms attached at the shoulders and my legs attached at the hips, thank you very much. If God wanted my arms and legs some where else, he'd given my pop joint shoulders and hips like Mr. Potato Head.

Makes you wonder how people successfully had sex for thousands of years before all this information was widely available!

The existence of large numbers of eight-year-olds who haven't witnessed multiple acts of copulation is entirely a phenomenon of the last century, when we first had a substantial non-rural population living in dwellings large enough to give parents a separate bedroom.

Let's see...did they include any diagrams alongside suggestive passages from ancient erotic poetry?

Admittedly, both the rabbis and the ministers/priests of the world have long held that the poetry seen here has some spiritual meaning.

But it's kind of hard to imagine that a people group with that in their Good Book is usually uninformed about things sexual.

Come to think of it, the modern concept of religious groups suppressing information about sexual intercourse seems to be a product of recent history.

As in, the Victorians brought through a cultural change concerning when/whether/how a person would converse about sexual matters. They also brought through a cultural change in how women thought of sex and intercourse. (Previously, the dominant narrative was that most women really liked sex...the new narrative was that the more moral a woman was, the less likely she was to enjoy sexual experience.)

This change was not necessarily religious. But those most likely to attempt to keep those patterns alive in the 20th Century (when large parts of the culture used the teaching of Freud as an excuse to switch to sexual libertinism) are the religious.

A book? Wouldn't a pamphlet discretely handed to the groom by the rabbi be sufficient? A basic diagram of what's what of the female anatomy for him, the male anatomy for her, taboos (anal?...), what do to, if anything, during her period or when she's pregnant, and don't frighten the livestock.

I hope the illustrations were done in a style similar to Chip Ahoy's "Two Jews." That would be divine.

But anyway, this is all nonsense.

Exhibit A) Jews are not gremlins. They do not replicate when exposed to water. Rather, they procreate through some mechanism similar to sex. They have done so for thousands of years without the need for illustrations.

Exhibit B) When it's your first time, even if you know what to do, you don't know what to do. I had my first time mentally scripted for years. Then it actually happened and I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Then instinct took over and the arms and legs wound up exactly where they were intended--handcuffed to the bedposts and wrapped together in duct tape, respectively.

So I doubt anyone with a robust sexual education is any better prepared for their first night of wild, screaming ecstasy than one who has had no sex education. In short, when two people's loins are just CHURNING with frantic, burning, irrepressible passion, there is only one obvious thing to do--and it's called sex.